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8 Responses to “Return of the Real– A Review of The Speculative Turn”

“One does not have to subscribe to any particular school of realist or materialist thought to see that our current circumstances urgently call for new ways of thinking the real; to broaden the scope of analysis from discourse and ideology to the actors – human and non-human, individual and collective – in our world and its becoming; to go beyond critique, and begin to build.”

Hmmm… I’m troubled by the way that speculative realism is being couched as a tool for the political Left, as if what was holding up political action was the lack of left-leaning philosophies. I’d rather say that it was the over-abundance of these that fragments the left – the failure to agree. Say what you like about the political Right, they can reach agreement on their big issues much more easily than the Left, especially in the US where the gap between the two is a veritable chasm.

The attempt to re-situate the real that you guys are up to continues to interest me, even while I approach it with a great degree of scepticism (since it runs counter to a lot of threads in philosophy of science which I still see as highly significant and unresolved).

I suppose my big question is: how does speculative realism propose to attain to any degree of agreement? Because this is by no means clear right now. I appreciate you are in something of an exploratory phase, but there’s a worrying sense of things being propelled by “faith in the real” i.e. once the new systems are constructed reality will become abundantly clear. It seems to me this view is quite a significant leap of faith. (Perhaps this is what the term “speculative” is intended to convey…)

Of course, I am constantly being beaten down for being “anti-realist” despite not feeling very anti-realist in my stance (although certainly not realist either!). I feel one can recognise limits on knowledge without claiming knowledge is impossible, and one can be suspicious of absolute claims in ontology without denying the validity of ontologies as valid models of reality. To riff off Hoy, true stories are never the only story.

When one denies an ontology is a model – as speculative realism seems to want to do (explicitly in Joshua’s review) – you take a giant leap into the Right’s way of thinking. Anyone who doesn’t recognise the value and importance of models for knowledge and science is in a supremely strange space, one which is less about overturning Kant and more about overturning Nietzsche. Is that really the most urgent pressure point to be working on? I’m not convinced.

Returning to my opening point – political change – what I feel is holding up political action in the US and elsewhere is a failure for dialogue between Left and Right to take place in anything other than partisan terms. I don’t see politics as a battle to be won but a game to be played – which doesn’t mean you don’t want to win, but it does mean that it’s about attaining goals not about “defeating enemies”. It’s my claim that partisan politics becomes too focussed on “the enemy” and thus loses sight of the goals (Arendt seems to have had similar leanings). A rescue attempt on the real, while of tremendous value in a number of places (the funniest of which is “robot ethics”, but let’s not go there today!), strikes me as too much of a grail to be an effective political tool. I’m prepared to be proved wrong! :)

Anyway, this has gone on long enough for a comment… Looking forward to Democracy of Objects whenever it turns up!

“I appreciate you are in something of an exploratory phase, but there’s a worrying sense of things being propelled by “faith in the real” i.e. once the new systems are constructed reality will become abundantly clear. It seems to me this view is quite a significant leap of faith.”

Chris, it’s hard to say what effect SR and OO could have on politics; I’ll accept both my position and yours are, at this point, matters of opinion. Time will tell. However, on this point:

“Say what you like about the political Right, they can reach agreement on their big issues much more easily than the Left, especially in the US where the gap between the two is a veritable chasm.”

Isn’t the Tea Party an example of exactly the kind of compulsive splittism the Left is usually accused of – obsession with ideological purity at the expense of discipline and effectiveness? They’re all about kicking out the RINOs, regardless of whether the economic-libertarian-fundamentalist candidates they prefer can actually win seats.

The problem for the Left in America is not that it can’t agree, it’s that it doesn’t exist, except as a fringe to the technocratic liberalism of the Democratic Party’s mainstream.

[…] “Return Of The Real”: This blog entry simply links to a three-part review of a recently-released anthology of what I consider the most exciting new thing in philosophy. Good thing too that The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism is available too as a free PDF, although I wish my Kindle could read it the way it could Graham Harman’s masterful Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. […]